Great post, cant agree more. I teach control systems and part of the course involves use of neural networks for control. I make students derive gradient update rule and corresponding Lyapunov functions.

Also, I saw your cs231 lectures on youtube and learned a lot from them. Those lectured and assignments helped me transition from simple neural networks to Deep Learning Networks. Visualization part is my favorite. Btw, here is the first big deep learning project I did, and you can see I used a lot of ideas from cs231n. “An augmentation based deep neural network approach to learn human driving behavior” https://chatbotslife.com/using-augmentation-to-mimic-human-driving-496b569760a9#.fjzkk340i